A Lunar Corona Was Seen Over Northern Israel Last Friday Night!

Last Friday night after we finished our shabbos meal, my daughter went to a neighbor’s house to visit a friend for a few minutes, and suddenly I hear her calling “Mommy, come quickly, you have to see this!.” I went outside, looked up and saw the most beautiful moon even, a moon encircled by what looked ilke a double rainbow! Truly amazing and not something I’ve ever seen, so I saw that other neighbors were still sitting at their shabbos table, and half barged in to tell them to take a look as well. I startled the mother just a bit, as no one expects a neighbor to run it to tell to look at a rainbow  moon, but rather in case of a emergency, generally, chas v’shalom, but they were really happy to see the amazing sight as well. Then, I ran back home to tell the rest of the family, and we all stood staring and saying wow, for a good 15 or so minutes as it was truly incredible. On shabbos we do not use cameras and phones and things like that, so no photos could be taken and in any case something like this is difficult to capture with most standard cameras as far as I know.

Fast forward to Saturday night after shabbos was over and I went to find out about this rainbow moon, finding only one photo that somewhat resembled what we saw, the one here by Sergio Montafur. Our moon was encircled by 2 sets of prisms as opposed to the one seen here, and the sky around the moon was dark. I did find out that it is called a lunar corona, and occurs when clouds are filled with 6-sided ice crystals that then project the light to form the circular prism. Wow, right? I have yet to find out how rare this is, but the fact that I could only find one photo, tells me it is certainly not all that common. A ring of light around the moon is called a halo, and we actually saw that the next night, with just a slight tinge of rainbow colors.

So dear readers, don’t forget to look up, you never know what surprises you might find!